Configuring Audiences: A Case Study of Email Communication

When people communicate with each other, their choice of what to say is tied to their perceptions of the audience. For many communication channels, people have some ability to explicitly specify their audience members and the dierent roles they can play. While existing accounts of communication behavior have largely focused on how people tailor the content of their messages, we focus on the conguring of the audience as a complementary family of decisions in communication.

We formulate a general description of audience conguration choices, highlighting key aspects of the audience that people could congure to reect a range of communicative goals. We then illustrate these ideas via a case study of email usage-a realistic domain where audience conguration choices are particularly ne-grained and explicit in how email senders ll the To and Cc address elds. In a large collection of enterprise emails, we explore how people congure their audiences, nding salient patterns relating a sender's choice of conguration to the types of participants in the email exchange, the content of the message, and the nature of the subsequent interactions. Our formulation and ndings show how analyzing audience congurations can enrich and extend existing accounts of communication behavior, and frame research directions on audience conguration decisions in communication and collaboration.

• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.